You Get Your Own Island

Exploring Wilderness Residencies at National Parks Across the Country

- Rachel Riederer

When poet Julie Chase-Daniel, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, spent a month with her husband, Matthew, a visual artist, on Loggerhead Key, an uninhabited island seventy miles west of Key West, Florida, she discovered a new sense of time. She’d start her mornings with a walk around the island, taking in the bird life and noticing how the tides might have shifted the sandy landscape overnight, and come back with her pockets full of shells and little objects she’d found, then spend the rest of the morning writing and reflecting. Her office was a beach chair and large umbrella. With no distractions—the island has no phone or internet service—she found a new rhythm. “It really changes the nature of time,” she says about life on the tiny island, part of Dry Tortugas National Park, without twenty-first-century technology. “You’re in tune with tides and the moon and the sunset. You’re able to understand your work more deeply across time,” she says.